GenAI brings the potential to unleash creativity as well as create advertising content with unparalleled efficiency. However, the ultimate question marketers should keep asking is “How can generative AI help make my creative effective?”.

With the onset of generative AI’s potential to create ads at scale, is the industry in danger of creating ineffective content efficiently? Or can AI help find the ultimate marketing sweet spot where efficiency meets effectiveness?

We wanted to explore how involving GenAI in the creation process could potentially improve the effectiveness of digital advertising. We did this by testing some fully AI-generated ads, along with others where GenAI played a partial role (i.e., writing the script or creating imagery), using Link AI for Digital – our AI powered ad-testing tool which uses data from 250,000 real-world ad tests to give indicative effectiveness results in as little as 15 minutes. In other words, we let our machines score the output of their fellow machines.

There are still relatively few ads created with at least some level of GenAI involvement, so we selected nine ads to explore, from high production value ads such as Masterpiece for Coca-Cola, to experimental ones such as Pepperoni Hug Spot that many will remember by its infamous tagline, “Like family, but with more cheese.”